History

Theodore Sorensen, John F Kennedy’s speechwriter, has died at the age of 82.

Mr Sorenson, whose mother Annis Chaikin was of Russian Jewish descent, died in New York following a stroke.
He joined the future president’s senatorial staff in 1953, when he was 25 and just out of law school.

He worked with President Kennedy during the 1960 presidential election and was one of the main figures in what came to be known as Camelot.

David Ben Gurion's birthday and Moshe Dayan's death fall on the same date, October 16. Both men ended their lives embittered, disillusioned, and with no fanfare.

They were utterly different personalities. Dayan was a daredevil, a man of danger and scandals. Both his courage in the battlefield and his skirt-chasing were legendary. He had no regard for the rules or conventions of his time, and he got away with it. Had he lived today, he could have sustained no political career and very likely he would have spent a few years in jail.

If you make your way beyond the outskirts of Kiev, deep into the forests of the neighbouring village of Radomyshl, you will come across an unmarked clearing amid the lush, green surroundings. But this bare patch of ground, like hundreds of other sites across the Ukrainian landscape, conceals a horrific and generally untold story.